4 Research Questions

This chapter begins by discussing how to design a research project. Even if you have no plans to create your own project, learning about the best practices for research design will help you evaluate the questions, methods, and findings of other scientists’ projects. Throughout this chapter, we’ll imagine that you, the reader, are a social scientist trying to start your project.

As discussed in previous chapters, research projects usually grow out of a question or area of interest. Do you like watching movies? Do you wonder what you and your peers might do with your degrees after college? Do you wonder how many people on your campus have been arrested, how many have been the victims of crime, or how many know that people of color are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system? Have you ever felt that you were treated differently at work because of your gender, or that the police stopped you because of your race or ethnicity? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may have the intellectual curiosity that social scientists use as the basis for their research projects.

While questions or observations about the world around you are an important starting point for developing social science research projects, topics in themselves need to be turned into questions that can be answered through scientific research. This chapter focuses on developing and evaluating empirical research questions, based on four features of a good research question. We’ll also discuss the importance of assessing feasibility and the relationship between a research question and previously published work on the chosen topic.

Topics

In research, a topic is an area of interest or a subject the researcher might be interested in learning more about. Topics often come from some observation or question that arises from researchers’ own lives. For example, as an undergraduate, I took a sociology class on drugs in U.S. society; I found out that I was interested in knowing more about how people thought about drugs. Whether thinking about a question you’ve had for some time, identifying a subject related to a course you’ve taken, or looking at patterns in your everyday life, you can discover a topic you might be interested in studying.

A topic is not a research question. Before turning the topic into a researchable question, you should examine your thoughts and feelings about the topic. While many researchers probably skip this step, examining your relationship to the topic can help identify biases and other issues that make it more difficult to study your topic. Start by asking yourself how you feel about your topic. Do you believe your perspective on the topic is the only valid one? Perhaps yours isn’t the only perspective, but do you believe it is the wisest or most practical one? How do you feel about other perspectives on this topic? If you feel so strongly that certain findings would upset you, you would design a project to get only the answer you believe to be the best, or you might feel compelled to cover up findings you don’t like, then you need to choose a different topic.

Of course, just because you feel strongly about a topic does not mean you should not study it. Sometimes the best topics to research are those about which you feel strongly. What better way to stay motivated than to study something you care about? Although you may have strong opinions about your topic, you might also feel okay about having those ideas challenged. Studying a topic relevant to your life can be very rewarding, as you learn new perspectives that might never have occurred to you before collecting data.

Whether or not you feel strongly about your topic, you will want to consider what you already know about it. We discussed the strengths and weaknesses associated with different sources of knowledge in Chapter 1, and we’ll talk about other sources of knowledge such as prior research later in this chapter. For now, take some time to think about what you know about your topic (from all possible sources). Thinking about what you already know helps identify any biases you may have, while also helping to frame a question about your topic.

Research Questions

Transforming a topic into a research question takes a lot of patience, especially if it’s your first time conducting a research project. Whereas a topic is an area or subject of interest, a research question is a question that can be answered using scientific knowledge. Sometimes, you might develop a research question based on what other researchers have found about a topic. Other times, you might rely on what you already know about a topic to form a research question (but, as mentioned in Chapter 2, researchers must carefully examine how they know what they know about a topic before proceeding too far with a research project). Social scientific theories can also guide the process of transforming a topic into a research question.

My research on public opinion of the police provides an example of how a researcher might transform a topic into a research question. As a criminal justice professor, I’m interested in developing scientific knowledge about the relationship between communities and the police. This topic provides a broad range of possible research questions. When my university’s local police department wanted to learn more about public opinion on the police, I agreed to work with them and some of our students to research this topic. I already knew quite a bit about the topic from teaching classes on policing, studying criminological theories, and reading what other researchers had written about police-community relations. I also knew from media reports that relationships between the police and communities could be different based on the demographics of communities, and how police officers and departments went about their daily work. Using information from these sources and working with the police chief, I developed a research question: How does public opinion about the police differ between neighborhoods with demographic characteristics? This question transformed the broad topic of police-community relations into a narrower question we could answer using scientific research methods.

This example makes it sound easy to narrow a topic into a research question, but it can take researchers months or even years to figure out what research question they’re trying to answer. Some researchers only begin to understand their research question after exploring a topic or deciding how they want to investigate. This happened to me as I worked on the research for what would become my first book. I started with an interesting area (moral panics), narrowed it a bit (societal responses to sex offenders), started gathering media reports and observing community meetings related to my topic, began to talk to people about my data, and then started to draft and refine a research question (how and why do communities respond differently to sexually violent predators in their neighborhoods?). This process took a few years. Overall, moving from topic to research question sometimes requires immersing yourself until a research question begins to form.

Literature Reviews

Library research is important, as a researcher transforms and refines their topic into a research question to form project ideas. A literature review entails searching for and synthesizing academic journals, articles, and books that have been published on your topic. Researchers conduct literature reviews at many points during the research process.

One of the drawbacks of being a researcher in the 21st century is that we can do most of our work without leaving comfortable spaces. This is certainly true of familiarizing yourself with the literature. Most libraries offer incredible online search options, including access to Criminal Justice Abstracts, a database that summarizes published articles in many criminal justice journals. You can learn more from your professor or librarian about accessing Criminal Justice Abstracts from your campus library. Once you’ve done so, use a keyword search to find a few articles that cover similar topics. At this stage, simply reading an article’s title and abstract will show how other researchers have framed similar questions. Hopefully, this will give you some ideas about how to phrase your research question.

Beyond searching the online resources, you can also visit your library and look at the most recent issues of journals on the shelves. Walk through the social science stacks and peruse the books published about your topic. Introduce yourself to the reference librarian, who can recommend other databases and published social scientific research on your topic.

Now, you may create a database of journal articles and books related to your topic. For those that seem more pertinent, you may add information about their research questions, methods, and findings. Free bibliographic software such as Zotero or spreadsheet software can help you organize your sources. Regardless of how you organize the work you find on your topic, examining what previous studies have found concerning your topic and research question can help sharpen your specific research question and ideas for how to answer it, while also helping you learn what sorts of questions other researchers have asked about your topic.

Once you have perused the library resources available to you, you’re ready to draft, refine, and evaluate your research question.

Evaluating Your Research Question

Once you’ve drafted a research question, you must evaluate the strength of the research question before moving on with your research project. Failure to do so could result in wasted time and money if you later determine that your research methods do not match your research question, or that your research plan won’t help you answer your actual research question. So, what makes a good research question? This section discusses four questions to consider when evaluating the strength of a research question.

1. Is it a question?

It may seem obvious that a research question must be a question, but when working with topics many students forget to develop an actual question or set of questions from their topic. For example, here’s an exchange a professor might have with a student trying to develop a research question:

Professor: “What do you think you’ll study for your research project?”

Student: “My research question is the death penalty.”

Professor: “Okay, so your topic is the death penalty. What about the death penalty are you interested in studying?”

Student: “I’m interested in students’ opinions about the death penalty.”

Professor: “Can you phrase that as a question?”

Student (thinks for a few minutes): “What do students think about the death penalty?”

Professor: “Yes! Now your question is a question.”

This student started with a topic (the death penalty), added detail, and then transformed that information into a question. If you’re trying to develop your research question and get stuck, you might ask yourself what about your topic you’re interested in knowing more about. That can help you start turning your topic into a question.

2. Is it focused?

A good research question focuses on a particular aspect of the topic the researcher wants to understand. Our imaginary student in the dialogue above has framed their question as a question, but it could still use some refining. Focusing on a research question often involves narrowing the question so that it centers on some question about the relationship between two or more variables. Here’s how the professor in our imaginary dialogue might help the student focus their research question:

Professor: “Now that you have a question, let’s narrow it down. Why is it important to know what students think about the death penalty?”

Student: “Well, the death penalty is a controversial topic. Some people think it should be legal while others don’t. So, we should know what people think about it.”

Professor: “Okay, so you’re interested in people’s opinions about the legality of the death penalty. But why students?”

Student (sighs at the professor’s questions): “College students are better educated than some people, so maybe their opinions on the death penalty differ. Plus, they might know more about it than other people.”

Professor: “Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. It sounds like you want to know what college students who know about the death penalty think about whether it should be legal or not.”

Student: “Yeah, so what about this question: How do criminal justice students’ opinions on whether the death penalty should be legal compare to other students’ opinions on the subject?”

Professor: “You’ve got it! That’s much more focused than your original question.”

In this continuation of the dialogue, the student has refined their question from a broad question (What do students think about the death penalty?) to a research question that requires examining the relationship between two variables: college major and opinions about the death penalty. The student has also narrowed the focus from “the death penalty” to “the legality of the death penalty.” These changes focus the question toward a feasible and specific research project.

3. Can it be answered without a simple yes or no answer?

Questions that can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no” do not make for good research questions, because they limit the insights a research project might provide on a given topic. For example, our imaginary student could ask, “Do criminal justice majors support the death penalty?”. After discovering their yes or no answer, they would have nothing more to say on the topic. Instead, asking, “How do criminal justice students’ opinions on the legality of the death penalty differ from other students’ opinions?” creates a more interesting question, that allows more nuanced insights to emerge about students’ opinions on the death penalty.

4. Does it have more than one plausible answer?

In addition to avoiding yes or no questions, a high-quality research question will have more than one plausible answer. For example, our imaginary student may have a specific interest in the relationship between college majors and opinions on the death penalty; they also might know that other factors influence perceptions of the death penalty. Perhaps their more politically conservative family members seem more supportive of the death penalty than their more liberal friends. Thinking through the possible relationships between college major, politics, and opinions on the death penalty might lead this student to realize that there are many plausible answers to their question about how college major relates to perceptions of the death penalty. Because students don’t choose their major in a vacuum, the researcher needs to account for other characteristics that work with college majors to shape people’s opinions.

In sum, a good research question generally has the following features:

1. It is written in the form of a question.
2. It is focused.
3. It is not a yes/no question.
4. It has more than one plausible answer.

Next Steps

Transforming topics into questions often leads researchers to have a few potential research questions they want to begin studying. However, even if they’ve identified the most brilliant research question, they still need to plan their study, which we’ll discuss more in the following chapters. For now, we’ll focus on assessing the feasibility of preliminary ideas, and how to answer a research question.

We learned about ethics and the limits posed by institutional review boards (IRBs) and disciplinary codes in Chapter 3. Beyond ethics, researchers must consider other practical matters before beginning a research project. In research, feasibility refers to the chances that a study can be conducted, with particular attention to accessing the target population and securing adequate resources to conduct the study.

First, researchers must consider their ability to access the populations they want to study. For example, let’s say you’re interested in the day-to-day experiences of maximum-security prisoners. This sounds fascinating, but unless you plan to commit a crime that lands you in a maximum-security prison, it may be nearly impossible to access this population. Similar feasibility issues arise when researchers want to study groups involved in crime, law enforcement organizations, courtroom actors, and corrections officials. While many researchers have studied these groups, it can take months (or even years) to connect with these populations.

Second, research requires resources, such as time and money. In terms of time, a researcher’s time frame for conducting research may constrain how they conduct their study. The time a researcher has to complete their work may depend on many factors. Professionally, a project may need to be completed by a certain date to count for job performance reviews or promotions. As a student, you may be required to complete your project by the end of the course. Employees or interns in political settings may need to conduct research within even shorter periods to share policymakers’ decisions on important social issues. These time constraints shape what sort of research a person can conduct.

Research also requires money. Your ideal research topic might require you to live on a chartered sailboat in the Bahamas for a few years, but that will be difficult without unlimited funding Similarly, if you want to study differences in lawyers’ interactions with clients in the United States and the United Kingdom, you would need money to pay for your travel, housing, food, and other research expenses while overseas. Researchers conducting survey research have to consider the costs associated with mailing surveys (including postage, the time needed to print surveys, address envelopes, and deliver them to the post office), or in the case of online surveys, the cost of subscriptions to high-quality surveying platforms. Interviewing people face to face may require you to offer your research participants a cup of coffee or a glass of lemonade while you speak with them.

In addition to the costs mentioned above, research that requires recruiting participants must factor in the time and money for creating and distributing flyers, emails, and other materials designed to encourage people to participate in the project. Because of these resource needs, researchers often secure funding through grants from their universities, states, or the federal government.

In sum, feasibility is always a factor when deciding what, where, when, and how to conduct research. Issues of accessing target populations and the availability of resources such as time and money play a major part in assessing the likelihood of conducting a study the way the researcher envisions it. If a researcher reflects upon their research question and determines it unlikely they could conduct a study to answer that question, they can return to their initial topic of interest, review the literature, and draft a new research question that may lead to a more feasible study.

Summary

• Topics are broad areas of interest that lead to more specific questions (i.e., research questions) that can be answered using scientific knowledge.
• Personal knowledge, feelings, and biases can guide the preliminary work of transforming a topic into a research question. Previous studies can help narrow the focus and refine the research question.
• Literature reviews involve searching for academic publications on your topic of interest. They can help researchers get ideas on how to phrase their research questions and potential methods for answering them.
• Good research questions are phrased as a question and focused, can be answered with more than a simple yes or no, and have multiple plausible answers.
• Research questions must allow for feasible research projects that match the realities of challenges in accessing populations of interest and resource limitations such as a lack of time or money.

Discussion Questions

1. Consider a topic you’re interested in learning more about. What do you already know about that topic? What feelings or biases might impact your ability to study the topic? What questions do you have about the topic?
2. Use the steps described in the “Literature Reviews” section, to find three empirical articles or books that may help you narrow your topic into a research question. For each source, note the bibliographic information, and the research question, method, and main findings. Draft a research question related to your topic.
3. Draft a research question related to a topic you’re interested in. Evaluate your question based on the four features of a good research question, and then revise your question to include all four elements.
4. Based on a research question you’ve developed, what might be some feasibility concerns related to a potential project you’d conduct to answer your research question? Considering access and resource concerns, would you need to revise your research question? Why or why not?